There are several trends in network and Internet usage, which tremendously increase the bandwidth that is being used on the Internet. One such trend is that more and more video is being viewed on demand on the Internet. Such viewing includes the viewing of both large and short video clips. In addition, regular shows and full-featured films may be viewed on the Internet. Another trend that is increasing the traffic on the Internet is that Web sites (such as shopping portals, news portals, and social networks) are becoming global, meaning that the Web sites are serving people in many diverse places on the globe, and thus the data is traversing over longer stretches of the Internet, increasing the congestion.
The increase in bandwidth consumption has created several major problems, a few of which are described below:    The problem for users—the current Internet bandwidth is not sufficient, and thus the effective ‘speed’ experienced by users is slow;    The problem for content owners—the tremendous amount of data being viewed by users is costing large amounts of money in hosting and bandwidth costs; and    The problem for Internet Service Providers (ISPs)—the growth in Internet traffic is requiring the ISPs to increase the infrastructure costs (communication lines, routers, etc.) at tremendous financial expense.
The need for a new method of data transfer that is fast for the consumer, cheap for the content distributor and does not require infrastructure investment for ISPs, has become a major issue which is yet unsolved.
There have been many attempts at making the Internet faster for the consumer and cheaper for the broadcaster. Each such attempt is lacking in some aspect to become a widespread, practical solution, or is a partial solution in that it solves only a subset of the major problems associated with the increase in Internet traffic. Most of the previous solutions require billions of dollars in capital investment for a comprehensive solution. Many of these attempts are lacking in that much of the content on the Internet has become dynamically created per the user and the session of the user (this is what used to be called the “Web2.0” trend). This may be seen on the Amazon Web site and the Salesforce Web site, for example, where most of the page views on these Web sites is tailored to the viewer, and is thus different for any two viewers. This dynamic information makes it impossible for most of the solutions offered to date to store the content and provide it to others seeking similar content.
One solution that has been in use is called a “proxy”. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram providing an example of use of a proxy within a network 2. A proxy, or proxy server 4, 6, 8 is a device that is placed between one or more clients, illustrated in FIG. 1 as client devices 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, that request data, via the Internet 22, and a Web server or Web servers 30, 32, 34 from which they are requesting the data. The proxy server 4, 6, 8 requests the data from the Web servers 30, 32, 34 on their behalf, and caches the responses from the Web servers 30, 32, 34, to provide to other client devices that make similar requests. If the proxy server 4, 6, 8 is geographically close enough to the client devices 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and if the storage and bandwidth of the proxy server 4, 6, 8 are large enough, the proxy server 4, 6, 8 will speed up the requests for the client devices 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 that it is serving.
It should be noted, however, that to provide a comprehensive solution for Internet surfing, the proxy servers of FIG. 1 would need to be deployed at every point around the world where the Internet is being consumed, and the storage size of the proxy servers at each location would need to be near the size of all the data stored anywhere on the Internet. The abovementioned would lead to massive costs that are impractical. In addition, these proxy solutions cannot deal well with dynamic data that is prevalent now on the Web.
There have been commercial companies, such as Akamai, that have deployed such proxies locally around the world, and that are serving a select small group of sites on the Internet. If all sites on the Web were to be solved with such a solution, the capital investment would be in the range of billions of dollars. In addition, this type of solution does not handle dynamic content.
To create large distribution systems without the large hardware costs involved with a proxy solution, “peer-to-peer file sharing” solutions have been introduced, such as, for example, BitTorrent. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram providing an example of a peer-to-peer file transfer network 50. In the network 50, files are stored on computers of consumers, referred to herein as client devices 60. Each consumer can serve up data to other consumers, via the Internet 62, thus taking the load of serving off of the distributors and saving them the associated costs, and providing the consumer multiple points from which to download the data, referred to herein as peers 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, thus increasing the speed of the download. However, each such peer-to-peer solution must have some sort of index by which to find the required data. In typical peer-to-peer file sharing systems, because the index is on a server 80, or distributed among several servers, the number of files available in the system is not very large (otherwise, the server costs would be very large, or the lookup time would be very long).
The peer-to-peer file sharing solution is acceptable in file sharing systems, because there are not that many media files that are of interest to the mass (probably in the order of magnitude of millions of movies and songs that are of interest). Storing and maintaining an index of millions of entries is practical technically and economically. However, if this system were to be used to serve the hundreds of billions of files that are available on the Internet of today, the cost of storing and maintaining such an index would be again in the billions of dollars. In addition, these types of peer-to-peer file sharing systems are not able to deal with dynamic HTTP data.
In conclusion, a system does not exist that enables fast transmission of most of the data on the Internet, that does not incur tremendous costs, and/or that provides only a very partial solution to the problem of Internet traffic congestion. Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.